Tourism is a €9.5bn industry, not just a bit of fun

It makes no sense that Minister for Transport Eamon Ryan is in charge of aviation but not tourism. Photograph: Gareth Chaney/CollinsA favoured cliché in dead-end discussions around Irish policymaking is, no matter what the problem is, to suggest that it needs its own minister or department. That will solve everything, right?

The last few weeks of the unbridled chaos that has ripped through all elements of the travel and tourism industries comes on top of more than two years of dire strategic thinking about the sector during the pandemic. These things are interlinked. One has led in large part to the other. Eamon Ryan is the Minister for Transport, as some people realised this week after he requested from the Minister of Defence that the Army be put on standby to help out at Dublin Airport. Separately, he holds a second daunting portfolio as the Minister for Climate, Environment and Communications. Technically, transport is 25 per cent of his responsibilities – maybe all of Monday plus a bit of Tuesday morning in his working week. Maybe he gets an entire afternoon out of aviation.

Martin seems a reasonably competent politician and she was on to a winner during the pandemic when all she had to do was throw around public money as compensation for Covid closures, and forget about strategy. But now she is ostensibly the main Minister for the tourism industry’s development and that can be observed by the fact that she is the one to whom the tourism agencies, Fáilte Ireland and Tourism Ireland, genuflect.

Look at how responsibility for the tourism industry has been bounced around different departments over the years. In the 1980s it was part of the Department of the Marine, perhaps because we were so reliant on ferries at the time. In 1987 it was transferred into the Department of Transport. Six years later it was shipped out to the department that corresponds roughly to the one now run by Martin.

When some people regularly pointed out during the pandemic that the clumsy and strategy-free Irish policy approach being adopted towards the travel industry would lead to operational scarring for years to come, they were not listened to enough. Having a single, unified, important voice sitting at the Cabinet table might have helped.

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